Page not found after adding i18n

[yolpsoftware]

Having trouble getting the i18n in Docusaurus to run. No matter what I tried on my own repository, I'm always getting a Page not Found error when accessing a page in a "foreign language". It seems that if you use the language switcher to go from English to German, then the language switcher will keep showing English as the selected language - so the /de/... URL seems to be routed to an English page which of course does not exist.

Here's my reproduction with a new Docusaurus instance:

• Run npx create-docusaurus@latest website classic, then select Typescript
• cd website
• npm start
• Website shows, everything OK
• Then add locales: ['en', 'de'] and a { type: 'localeDropdown', position: 'right' } to the config
• Website now shows the language switcher
• Switch to language German

Now the website shows the same "Page not found" error I'm also getting in my own repository.

• Yes, there aren't any translated pages / components so far - but shouldn't that mean that the website is just shown in fallback English?
• Why does the language switcher keep showing English as the selected language? If "Page not found" means that I'm missing the translated page in German, then the language switcher should show German as the selected page.
• In my own repo, I tried many things, including write-translations and other Docusaurus tools, and I let Cursor / Claude try to figure it out for more than an hour, but we were always stuck at the same "Page not found".

If this is a bug, I'm happy to write an issue, but it just seemed to be too basic to be a bug, so I'm rather expecting some pretty dumb thing I have missed when setting it up.

[yolpsoftware]

By the way, if you use the language switcher at https://docusaurus.io/docs/i18n/tutorial, strange things happen..

@slorber

[slorber]

@yolpsoftware we currently have an i18n bug on our production website, which is unrelated to your problem and I'm working on it

[slorber]

When you start your website, you only start it for a single locale at a time, because each site is a separate, standalone app in practice.

This is documented here: https://docusaurus.io/docs/i18n/tutorial#start-your-site

When running docusaurus build, by default it will loop over each locale and build each localized site one after the other. And the locale dropdown will work on your production deployment.

[yolpsoftware]

Thank you Sébastien @slorber, this was of course the reason it didn't work. Sorry for not having seen this in the docs.

Now everything works - except the pages. Navbar, Footer, Markdown files, everything is showing translated texts (if there is translation), but the home page (which is a Docusaurus page) is not, even though we have translations for it in the i18n folder.

Is there some kind of verbose log I can consult to see what might be wrong?

[slorber]

We don't have logs for that but if you give me a small docusaurus.new repro I could tell you what you did wrong